Category Archive

If you call yourself a bibliophile then you have no doubt owned, consulted, or yearned for a bibliography on more than one occasion. These endlessly helpful reference books are the product of dedicated people who do the yeoman’s work of researching authors, genres, and subjects of every kind, so that we don’t have to, while still allowing us to all bask in the glow of their accumulated knowledge. For that we owe them many, many thanks. In that spirit, we point out that the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers is preparing to name the winner of its 16th Annual Breslauer Prize for Bibliography. The list of submissions is long and varied and bound to included more than one worthy title, but as Sean Connery has taught us: “There can be only one!” Each week from now until the winner is announced ILAB will feature a different book on its website. The first title can be found here and for the full Breslauer Prize Press Release click this link. All hail the bibliographer!

The collator on our printer isn’t working, so we were forced to make our latest archive and manuscript catalog the old-fashioned way… (rare book catalog making video by Tom, who curiously isn’t collating, stapling, folding, etc.)

Today marks the centenary of the now largely-forgotten poet Audrey Wurdemann, who was the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry – she won for her 1934 collection Bright Ambush when she was just 24 years old. Wurdemann married the poet and novelist Joseph Auslander in 1932, and in addition to her several volumes of poetry she also co-wrote a few novels with him. She died in 1960 when she was only 49.

News for those of you who have visited our site in the past and said, “I love this site, but it’s really slow…” Now, thanks to the web programming wizardry of Mika Babcock at Foreseeing Solutions, who dug deep into the database coding to root out the problems, our website is significantly faster. Mika’s site speed improvements will be an ongoing effort, but we think what he’s accomplished so far is pretty impressive. We invite you to take the re-coded site for a test drive…

Here at Between the Covers we are awash in art of all kinds from literature to photographs to paintings to theater to, well, you get the idea. While most of these examples exist as relics from the past there is one ongoing example that, while not birthed here at BTC, was co-created by two of our very own alumni, and it’s called Fun-A-Day. It’s a project organized by Artclash Collective, a Philadelphia-base artist group, that challenges anyone anywhere – not just artists – to experience the joy of creation by making a new piece of art, any kind of art, every day for the entire month of January.

I’d like to welcome you to the first entry of the Between The Covers Blog. My name is Matt Histand and the powers-that-be have put me in charge of this new endeavor. In the coming days, Tom Congalton, Dan Gregory, and myself will take turns posting new entries on a weekly basis, so please check back with us every Tuesday to read about the doings here at BTC, and occasionally the topic of bookselling.